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No one seemed happier with the debut of universal pre-kindergarten today than Mayor Bill de Blasio, but New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer says there are still big problems with some of the pre-K sites. Government Affairs Reporter Melissa Russo reports. (Published Thursday, Sep 4, 2014)

Updated at 9:12 PM EDT on Thursday, Sep 4, 2014

Mayor Bill de Blasio greeted scores of prekindergarten students Thursday on the first day of school and the first day of his ambitious expansion of early childhood education.

"Everything that we've done over the last few years is working toward this day," de Blasio said after visiting a classroom at Inner Force Tots in Brooklyn, a community-based organization that's part of the pre-K program.

Many of the city's new pre-K seats are in religious schools that have been given guidelines on keeping religious instruction out of their public-school classes.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan joined de Blasio and McCray on Staten Island at the Sacred Heart School, which has tripled its pre-K capacity this year.

"Mayor, I have bad news," Dolan joked. "We missed the snack."

De Blasio told a Sacred Heart student who was building a treehouse with blocks, "You're an architect, you know that? You're building a house."

De Blasio and McCray later read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to pre-K students at Home Sweet Home, a community-based organization in Queens.

The victory lap was meant to calm fears that the city might be expanding pre-K too rapidly.

City officials announced this week that nine pre-K centers wouldn't open and start dates of 36 others would be delayed. Safety and integrity concerns were behind the decision to revoke contracts at the nine centers, which were to serve 265 students.

De Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina said they were unaware of any pre-K centers that did not open as scheduled Thursday.

Thursday was also the first day of school for most of the rest of the city's 1.1 million public school students. Some charter schools started earlier.

Laila Ortiz said she was excited to start third grade at Public School 33 in Chelsea.